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Freakonomists Dubner and Levitt propose a solution for people who don’t clean up after their dogs in NYC: a mandatory doggie DNA database against which sidewalk dookies are compared and fines mailed out for offenders.
Everything and Nothing rounds up a list of searchable versions of the work of that most famous of English wordsmiths, William Shakespeare. The public domain rocks.
20 unusual non-English words sent in by readers of the BBC Magazine (in response to this article about a new book on unusual words). Plimpplampplettere, the Dutch word for skipping stones, is sublime.
Freeman Dyson on his friend and colleague Richard Feynman for The New York Review of Books.
A rare interview with Stephen Hawking about his remix of A Brief History of Time. The interview’s a bit weird…the interviewer doesn’t seem to know a whole lot about science.
Flowers don’t smell as good as they used to and part of the reason is breeding…they’re breeding flowers for looks and longevity, not for scent. I believe Michael Pollan discusses this in his excellent The Botany of Desire (tulip chapter).
This looks like an interesting book from O’Reilly: Practical Development Environments. “This book doesn’t tell you how to write faster code, or how to write code with fewer memory leaks, or even how to debug code at all. What it does tell you is how to build your product in better ways, how to keep track of the code that you write, and how to track the bugs in your code. Plus some more things you’ll wish you had known before starting a project.”
Tim O’Reilly op-ed about the Authors Guild’s lawsuit against Google regarding their Library Project. “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy”. The op-ed follows Tim’s earlier post on the subject.
Book reviews based on a random sentence from each book. On Moby-Dick: “People who enjoy witty banter will love this tale of two unlikely friends, Ahab and Stubb.”
Praise be, someone’s picked up the development of the MTAmazon plug-in for Movable Type. (thx jason)
What should I read next? is what it says…you enter the title and author of a book you like and the site will suggest something for you to read next.
For those who are lazy about their religion, there’s the 100-Minute Bible, sort of a Cliff Notes version of the Good Book. “The 100-Minute Bible is primarily intended for people who have an interest in Christianity but not the time (nor tenacity!) to read the whole Bible. As the title indicates most people will only take 100 minutes to read it, making it ideal for an upcoming rail or aeroplane journey.”
Kurzweil’s new book on the singularity is out at the end of the month. It’s a sequel to the excellent The Age of Spiritual Machines. “By 2045, we’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it”.
Profile of Robert Trivers who “came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs”.
Scientists are having a bit of fun wondering about the genetics of wizardry in Harry Potter. “This suggests that wizarding ability is inherited in a mendelian fashion, with the wizard allele (W) being recessive to the muggle allele (M). According to this hypothesis, all wizards and witches therefore have two copies of the wizard allele (WW).”
Here’s a sampling of the rest of the AIGA Design Conference, stuff that I haven’t covered yet and didn’t belong in a post of it’s own:
1. Design is the easy part.
2. Learn from your clients, bosses, collaborators, and colleagues.
3. Content is king.
4. Read. Read. Read.
5. Think first, then design.
6. Never forget how lucky you are. Enjoy yourself.
For more of what people are saying about the conference, check out IceRocket. There’s a bunch of photos on Flickr as well.
I must be living in a cave because I hadn’t really heard of the Daily Show’s America the Book (more here) before today’s presentation by Paula Scher and Ben Karlin.
A sequel to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: A Briefer History of Time. “More Accessible. More Concise.”
Long interview of Jane Jacobs by James Kunstler. I think it may be time to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities again.
There’s a book coming out in December based on PostSecret, a web site that displays postcards with secrets written on them sent in by readers. I heard something long ago about the site not actually using reader submissions, at least in the beginning before it got popular enough to get the quality of entries that they post…did anyone actually verify or debunk that rumor?
Update: PostSecret proprietor Frank Warren responds and John Nick effectively explains how the site was bootstrapped from an offline event.
Malcolm Gladwell on why focus groups suck. Focus groups are an attempt by management to reduce risk (and with it, potential reward)…Gladwell says that management should instead trust their creatives, be patient, and tolerate uncertainty.
If you’re a Flickr user, you can now get a book of your photos printed up for display on your coffee table or to put in your bathroom bookshelf. I’ve got one of these and it’s neater than I expected.
Chris Ware’s new book is out soon and Salon has an early review. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is one of my favorite books of all time.
In Jim Holt’s review of three recent books about bullshit, he writes:
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn’t be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter’s fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth.
In thinking about Judeo-Christian religion, atheism is a bit like bullshitting in this respect. If you believe in God, you also necessarily believe in the existence of Satan. So too for Satanists…like the liar, they are concerned with the counterpart to their main interest (i.e. God) as something to defend against. But atheists opt out and don’t believe in the existence of either.
Update: There’s been a bit of confusion as to what I’m actually trying to say here. My fault. I’m definitely not trying to say that atheists are bullshitters. Or that Satanists are liars. Or that Christians believe in Satan (as opposed to believing in the existence of Satan). What I’m saying that as both truth-tellers and liars are concerned with the true and false, so too are Christians and Satanists both concerned with God and Satan. But the bullshitter cares little for the true or false, just as an atheist is little concerned with God or Satan.
Also, someone pointed out that Satanists often don’t worship Satan. Sez the Wikipedia entry on Satanism:
Many Satanists do not worship a deity called Satan or any other deity. Unlike many religions and philosophies, Satanism generally focuses upon the spiritual advancement of the self, rather than upon submission to a deity or a set of moral codes.
So my whole point is shot anyway. (thx, kevin)
Shakespeare put coded messages about Catholicism into his plays that, due to the “Protestant, Whig ascendancy”, have not been decoded until now.
Short positive review of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (@ Amazon). Thumbed through it at the bookstore yesterday and it did look good…but I’ve got too many books in my queue already.
In addition to books, you can check people out of the Malmo, Sweden library. The library “will let curious visitors check out living people for a 45-minute chat in a project meant to tear down prejudices about different religions, nationalities, or professions”.
Totalitarian Institutions That Would Have Been More Fitting for George Orwell’s 1984, Considering How That Year Turned Out. “The Ministry of the Beef, and Where It Currently Is”.
On reading (or not). “Since when did a regular quota of suitably serious reading matter become obligatory?”
Trailer for Shopgirl, based on a book by Steve Martin and starring, tada, Steve Martin (and Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman). “I can either hurt now or hurt later…”
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